A different wave
The waves project from last week got me thinking about waves. Combining some LED edge illumination ideas from he past with the notion of a wave was the next step in my mind. So, started with the matrix, measured and calculated how to isolate each row of 16 leds from the other. Lots of black painted wood was the answer. Then I drew up 16 waves and spent a bit of time figuring out how they should evolve from row to row to give a nice 3-d wave shape. No fancy math this time, just a lot of handle dragging in inkscape. The first pass on the wave did not have the engraved wave pattern and as a result, were not very impressive. Adding those allows each row to really put out what the matrix is laying down.
I wanted to run a variation of my lantern code on the matrix. I made a version that is focused more on the blue and green colors and less on reds and yellows. Then I hit a wall when it was time to load that into an arduino. I first tried a adafruit trinker pro. That board uses 5 volt logic (vs most that use 3.3 v) . 5 volt logic means I would not need a level shifter to talk to the leds. Easy peasy but I could not get it to upload. The trinkets are always a challenge but this was epic. So, I switched to using one of my clock brain boards. That uses a trinket m0 which is typically easier to program and far more capable. The clock brain board has the required level shifter , and the one I picked out of the clock brain repository had passed QC meaning it was working and driving LEDs. But, once again, could not get it to upload. Rebooted PC thinking that might be the issue. Nope. Spent a day in frustration trying to sort it. Back to the trinket pro, back to the M0. Nothing worked. Punted and put an off the shelf brain in there. Not my patterns but better than nothing. Sealed it up. Done but not thrilled.
Woke up the next day with one thought. THE CABLE. So, found another usb micro b cable and what do you know, it worked. I got a medieval on the case, and swapped in the trinket pro. Ah, so much better. Much more organic feeling vs the store bought patterns.
I hope to put together another one that is rectangular, by using 8 x 32 matrix in place of this 16 x 16. So, half as many layers but each layer would be twice as wide.
